How to Make A Hydraulic Arm In Cinema 4D Revisited

Today, we will revisit the older hydraulic arm tutorial which broke in the change from R13 to R14, we will rig up a robotic arm from scratch. This time we’ll also put together the claw and wrist setup instead of ending in a stump, plus add in tubes for hydraulics that automatically stick to the proper spots. We’ll be using lot’s constraint tags, spline IK tags, and one very important IK tag.

In part one we will setup the mechanics for the arm and claw, building enough geometry to give us the proper visual queues to know we’re making it correctly. Also, we will be paying close attention to priorities of out rig to weed out order of operations mistakes.

Part 1

In part two we’ll add in the pistons for the hydraulics, setup the tube system for linking different parts of the robot, and add a control for moving the base around. At the very end we’ll use this rig as raw material to put together an entire bipedal robot rig.

Chris,
another great tutorial!
Thanks!
One question though: You showed the hydraulic cabling technique, I think, in a lamp tutorial before. And as you mentioned in this tutorial, it kind of breaks, when the parts are moving too far, so the splines stretch too much. What I’d really love to see (and tried doing by myself in several ways without any success yet), would be a technique to constrain the length of the splines as well. That would be sooo awesome!
Anyway, thanks a lot again!

The reason I don’t do that is when I do character animation I use the selection tool to only grab Spline objects. Nulls are often used in the model/rigging thus could be accidentally grabbed. That of course could be avoided with setting/hiding layers but I like it as a workflow.

thanks Chris for sharing all the great tips&tricks “hidden” inside your tutorial … especially the “Spline to Joints” with the IK-Spline is a much simpler way then the dynamic spline to create this kind of connections. also the magic “Connect” object found another use for that “double-sweep” … VERY helpful and thanks again!

Thanks Chris. I think it would be so much nicer if the duration of these tutorials were a little bit less. So, when people reference back to them, it would be much easier to find these awesome tips. Cheers, Love ya guys.

That’s the trick though, people ask for topics that are long! Rigging or animation will almost always be longer unless broken down into tiny pieces, which would end up being more of ‘this tool does this’ video rather than making something fun.

Welcome
I wanted to tell you I’m the biggest fan of your business, and you’d like to tell you something about this lesson in the second video in the ninth minute precisely, why not use the Xpresso ? calculate ? distance ? and make the hydraulic piston extends and shortens with the movement without the presence of a distance.
I am an Arab nationality of Libya and I hope that the message is clear because I’m not good at English.

Because thats the way hydraulic works. In the real world no cylinder would grow magicaliy. Its just moving metal. No growing, no streching.
The only way is a longer piston. Longer piston, longer distance.

Hi! Thanks a lot for this great tutorial !
Just a question about the technique used for the “cables” stretching with the robot movement … possible to use it with an Helix ?
To get some kind of a car suspension spring type.
The helix will produce a lot of joints after using the “Spline to joints” function, and an huge object manager list …

Wow, thanks Chris! You and Nick have taught me a ton over the years. Your previous hydraulic arm tutorial was a major resource for some robots in a music video I did a while back: http://vimeo.com/92260809
Can’t wait to mess around with the Convert Spline To Joints technique!

Well explained tutorial..First of all thanks for explaining all the points step by step.With the help of your article,I can easily make a hydraulic arm.
Thanks for sharing!
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Hi There,
I find your projects just great! Thanks for all that work!
A dream would come true if you could one day present a “customizable robot” for C4D…
You guys are the right ones to do that: A robot where I can enter my own robotic body parts like arms legs feet, head etc. and you provide the rigg, presets for moves and a great tutorial…. how do you like the idea? I would love to build a custom robot for my company:)
please let me know if this can be some day
cheers Michael

Chris,
thank you for this tutorial!
Remember in the beginning of part 2 you said you had a problem so I seem to be having the same one there. when I press Constraint “Up” my Extrude goes wrong direction. Could you please tell how to solve it? Thanks again.

Awesome tutorial! Has really helped me with a project for work. I had a slight issue with the Up Vector constraint on the hydraulic tubes, whereby they were moving in an erratic manner, so I just added an aim constraint as well as the Up Vector and this seems to have worked (using Cinema 4D R16). Thanks again!!

Awesome tutorial! Could you please make a little addition to it ? I’d really be interrested in picking up an object like a cube with it… I was searching around the net but didnt really find a tutorial about that.